The Unfinished Land

Valdis

VALDIS HAD LEFT the Eaters’ Ravine and stabled her horse in Zodiako, the southwestern shore’s only human town. She had moved through the darkness with the pacted Eaters, down to the wide scimitar of beach, and there they had found sleeping Spaniards and done what was necessary to remain Eaters, not so different from what these men themselves did to stay alive—steal time from animals, a long chain of thievery back to when Hel was young and the Crafters first shaped their brutal tales.

In appearance Valdis still kept a semblance of the adolescent girl she had once been, five centuries ago, but no longer flesh so much as sea foam or soft crystal, shot through with a greenish inner light.

She walked between the sailors and soldiers, looking for her assignment. When possible, she kept to shadows and took on their darkness. Tonight she was not here to sup, but merely to identify and confirm, as instructed by Calybo, the Afrique, eldest and greatest of the Eaters’ island clan. Calybo in turn followed the orders of one of the island’s Vanir, those just beneath the sky: Guldreth. Valdis’s parents had long ago told stories about Aesir and Vanir and their wars, but none of that seemed to matter here, and she had never heard of Aesir on this isle. Whose orders Guldreth followed was never made clear by any who had met her, so Valdis suspected that at the top of the island’s command was Hel. Nobody she knew had ever seen Hel, no matter how old they were or claimed to be.

While ten of the island’s clan wandered the beach, glittering figures of fairy glass and foam, supping of the gross, dark Spanish, young and old, the men in armor and boys in rags writhed and groaned as if suffering from bad dreams, as no doubt they were. Having one’s life stolen was never pleasant.

Then Valdis found the one she was assigned to. The boy lay on a small patch of disturbed sand, filthy, his hands grasping as if trying to catch hold of ropes, but not caught entire in the spell laid on the camp. As she leaned over him, he looked up through heavy-lidded eyes and seemed almost to see her. Those eyes rolled in fear.

So young!

Gliding closer, then kneeling to peer into his face, she felt such a surge of confusion and hope that her entire body seemed caught in a flash of lightning. He was scrawny and not particularly handsome and smelled of sweat and horses and salt water. He must have come from far out at sea, far beyond the gyre. Normally, such would be prime fare for Eaters. But not this one. He had reddish hair. She had been told by Calybo to look for it.

The sense of smell given to Valdis and her kind was extraordinary. They could smell backwards and forwards, and connect what they smelled to what others over centuries had smelled. This boy smelled alive, of course, growing out before him rich lengths of time like a plant making sap. He had a very long and busy life ahead of him, and she would not take that away, nor even borrow of it.

As for the life behind him…

Nothing! He had memories, but no time, and this caused her more wonder and confusion. She pulled back from the boy, not at all sure of her power to keep him still.

A few yards away, Calybo ministered to an old man, making strange noises. Valdis recognized the old man despite his wizened face and shriveled form. He was Widsith, a lover to Guldreth; husband to villager Maeve; and friend to Maggie, healer and leader of the blunters who managed the drakes along the shore. He had been gone for over forty years and had aged accordingly, so Calybo was doing what centuries past he had agreed to do for this one man: replenish the returned Pilgrim with what he needed to remain useful to Travelers and Crafters—health, denser bones and teeth, younger flesh, and time enough to report and inform the island, and prepare to go out again.

It was ever Widsith’s task to explore the outer world and make his own estimation of how the plots and plans of the Crafters had changed things. For it was important to all on the island, including the Eaters, to know just what the Crafters were doing, as much as anyone could.

Without yet taking even a small taste of this boy’s history, it was obvious he was different from any other human on the island, and for that she was glad. Looking at his face, Valdis remembered some of what she had lost by being saved by the Eaters. She imagined herself and this boy sitting in a cabin on the side of a mountain and talking while snow swirled outside. He would tend a fire and smile at her. She would draw forth a blanket and welcome him to her warmth.

Except that she was no longer warm.

And this vision would never come true.

She leaned in, touched her lips to his forehead, then kissed him lightly on his own lips and neck. All she could manage with such brief contact was to grab a second or two, an impression from whence he came—but even that little was difficult. Calybo had said, recruiting Valdis in the Ravine, that if she found the right boy, his memories would be jagged and incomplete, his emotions electric—perhaps dangerous to an Eater.

Calybo was the oldest Eater on the island, full of time and great-powered. He could usually recharge a servant at small cost. But Widsith…

Long Calybo lingered over the old man, hand on his heart, and then, with a look of resolve, sank his head to the Pilgrim’s chest and sang an awful song of exchange. When Eaters consumed time, they were silent, stealthy, not to arouse or disturb. When Eaters gave, it was a sickening, noisy process, half scream, half chant, as if the memories that accompanied those years were being voiced against their will and shared with the listening air…

It took many minutes for the old African to finish. He stood, straightened his night-dark garments, and looked her way with a frightful, hungry face—a face of utter exhaustion. He would be days rearranging his store of time to feel well again.

Along with the boy, Widsith had also brought the Spanish to this isle. This aroused Valdis’s curiosity, dulled by long centuries in the Ravine and the mix of memories absorbed with her quotient of time. What purpose might the Spanish have here? What tales of the finished lands could the Pilgrim tell? And would he tell those tales only to Travelers, among the few authorized to convey them to Crafters—or just to Guldreth?

The Eaters were done for this evening. They would keep to the woods or, sated, return through Zodiako to retrieve their horses.

Valdis never questioned anything about Guldreth, though deep in her dozing memory, in the Ravine, later, she would wonder about Guldreth’s relationship to the Pilgrim… How important this old man was to a near-god.

And Guldreth shared her bed and energy with other human lovers. Mysterious how those relations were maintained!

And of course there was this red-haired boy, another mystery, who aroused something even more untoward within the youngest Eater in the Ravine. Something that could never be, for in her brief sampling, Valdis saw that this boy had been touched by a being even more mysterious than Guldreth or Calybo, perhaps more mysterious than the Crafters or Hel herself.

A man with a white shadow.